meaninglessness

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

I had someone once who made every day mean something.And now_. I am lost_.And nothing means anything anymore.

Self glory makes life meaningless, glorify God fulfills it

Even if it's meaningless . . . sometimes, nice things happen.

What saves us from succumbing to utter meaninglessness is not reason but instinct.

Because here__ something else that__ weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship__e it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles__s that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It__ the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It__ been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they__e evil or sinful, it__ that they__e unconscious. They are default settings. They__e the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that__ what you__e doing.

In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.

All people intuitively seek emotional equanimity, freedom from anxiety, distress, and trepidation that might cause a person to lose symmetrical balance of their mind. Nature intended for human beings to live in an enthusiastic and curious manner, always exploring, striving, and creating.

The problem with arguments is that it never adds up to any value to the subject.

Meaningless! Meaningless!__ays the Teacher.__tterly meaningless!Everything is meaningless.__hat do people gain from all their laborsat which they toil under the sun?Generations come and generations go,but the earth remains forever.The sun rises and the sun sets,and hurries back to where it rises.The wind blows to the southand turns to the north;round and round it goes,ever returning on its course.All streams flow into the sea,yet the sea is never full.To the place the streams come from,there they return again.All things are wearisome,more than one can say.The eye never has enough of seeing,nor the ear its fill of hearing.What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again;there is nothing new under the sun.Is there anything of which one can say,__ook! This is something new_?It was here already, long ago;it was here before our time.No one remembers the former generations,and even those yet to comewill not be rememberedby those who follow them.

The time you absolutely have to get off your ass and act is when action seems futile